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Into the Bradlands for health

Grateful for Gratitude

11/17/2017

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​Its Thanksgiving season and its all about food.  And since this is a site that is first of all about food, there must be something to say about it at Thanksgiving: how to make it healthy, how not to eat too much of it..... blah to that.  Just eat in the ways that the Nutrition Kitchen exemplifies most of the time and go enjoy your Thanksgiving meal.   Here I want to get beyond food and explore other aspects of life that effect our health and wellness.  Does practicing gratitude qualify? 

As it turns out, a gratitude practice can have a powerful effect on your health and well being.  Research is demonstrating that practicing gratitude can have real impact even on your physical well being via lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system (maybe we should be grateful that Thanksgiving comes just as the cold and flu season is coming on), less aches and pains, better sleep patterns, even better and more consistent exercise habits. 

Its no surprise that practicing gratitude has a significant impact on psychological health.  Grateful people demonstrate higher levels of positive emotions overall: joy, pleasure, optimisim, generally more alert and alive in the world they live in.  Gratitude is like an antibiotic for toxic emotions like envy, resentment and regret: the chicken soup of psychological health.  

Socially is where practicing gratitude can have some of the greatest positive effects on your life as you demonstrate more compassion and forgiveness and feel less lonely and isolated.  Grateful people are more outgoing and connected in life enhancing relationships generally.  I get that:  I much prefer to hang around people who see the good in things rather than complaining about them, and doing so adds more positive vitality to my own existence without a doubt. 

Given all the physical, mental and social benefits, why wouldn't we cultivate a gratitude practice?  Here are a few that seem to work for me.  

Count your blessings.   Training your mind and heart to be habitually grateful requires something concrete to focus on.  Just going for a fuzzy "I'm gonna be more thankful" attitude doesn't get you there.  Keeping a gratitude journal is a good way to do this, or just starting and ending your day making a list in your mind will help.  When I wake up at night and my "dark time brain" starts stressing out about the difficult things I'm working on, I have started to intentionally make lists of what I'm grateful for, saying prayers of thanksgiving.  It really is true that being grateful leads to a better night's sleep. 

Look for the good in the bad.  Having to pay the mechanic's bill sucks, but thank God for credit cards.  Or actual bank accounts, if you're not me.  Every challenge comes with an opportunity,  if you look for it.  Sometimes the only (or at least the easiest) one to find is simply the opportunity to reconnect  with what's really important in life, and that in itself will always have a long term transcendent benefit.  Which leads to...

Stay focused on the good stuff.  Its easy to zero in on what's wrong with our circumstances, that person, the world, whatever. But if that's where our gaze stays focused our stress hormones continue to deconstruct our wellness systems and life continues to disintegrate. We become what we contemplate.  Continuing to return to our lists of what we're truly grateful for does not deny or diminish the significance of the difficult things we need to deal with, but we need to allow them to stay on the periphery of our existence rather than become the core of who we are, if we want that core to be the foundation of a life that is well and lived well. 

Put some leather on your love.  That's the name of a song I wrote once: maybe I'll record that one some day.  The point is that doing something good for someone else increases your attitude of gratitude exponentially.  I'm not generally a big fan of making comparisons because I think they can lead to either envy or pride, two extremely toxic emotions.  But doing acts of compassion that cause you to prioritize what you have to give rather than what you haven't got is one of the healthiest ways to support a gratitude practice. 

These are just a few of my favorites.  The list could go on and on: for more resources and ideas I recommend Robert Emmen's work, such as Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude can Make you Happier.  He has a paperback called Little Book of Gratitude with a Kindle version that's only $1.99.  Now there's an investment in wellness.  

For now suffice it to say that practicing gratitude can have amazingly powerful effects on your ability to be well and live well: mind, body and spirit.  If this stuff could be bottled and sold all of our evening newscasts would be full of ads telling us to ask our doctor for a prescription.  But here it is: free for the taking if we just embrace it and embody it.  

I'm very grateful for that. 



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Welcome to my blog

11/13/2017

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Welcome to my blog.  I know this site is first of all about the Nutrition Kitchen, but truth be told I have interests in many aspects of health and wellness.  So if you’re interested, this is where you will find me ruminating on some of those.  Things related to nutrition might find their way here, of course, especially if I think it’s something that deserves a longer treatment than a short facebook post.  Think recipes, for instance.  Other categories I think are important that relate to wellness might include:

Fitness.  The nutrition kitchen first started when I was approached by a personal trainer who knew that if his clients were really going to get to mission accomplished they needed a solid nutritional program to complement their fitness training.  And off we went.  Along the way we had an ongoing debate about how big a piece of the pie (that would be a turkey pot pie with almond crust and granola topping: fans of the kitchen might recognize that) each element was in the overall picture.  Oddly enough, we both insisted that the other’s discipline was the more important: I went for fitness, he went for nutrition.  Regardless of where it falls, this is something I’ve been interested in and on occasion may have some thoughts.  Or I might have a guest who actually knows what they’re talking about give us an offering.  

Stress management.  In my studies on wellness, particularly some of what I dived into during my education with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I became impressed by how important this issue is in our overall wellness.  Thinking about just how under-appreciated this issue is totally stresses me out sometimes.  But seriously, although I sometimes lose track of the degrees and certificates I have: pre-grad, grad, post grad degrees; culinary school, health coach training…. If I were to dive into it one more time the one I would consider would be mindfulness based stress management.  I actually created an 8 week course in that based on my studies which I make available for free if you’re interested.  In any event, It is very possible you’ll get exposed to your fair share of my rants on that subject.

Other stuff.  In my mind, wellness means living well in this world which starts with being well.  That broadens the horizons of what is fair game for discussion, as you can imagine.  I  take particular interest, for example, in the mind/body/spirit connection.  That can bring us into some of those fuzzy areas related to spirituality and relationships and such stuff.  You may end up deciding you need to be a little more discerning here, and just stick with the recipes for turkey pot pie.  I completely get that.  Don’t worry.  

My personal mission is that every day I want do something that adds value to someone else’s life.  I’m going to do my best to see that whatever ends up on this page has the potential to do that for my readers.  I will post to the Nutrition Kitchen facebook page when something new comes up, so liking that will be a good way to get notified when I’ve gone off on something I thought might be useful.  

To your health,

Brad

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    Brad Kunkel

    Chef, health coach, wellness geek, thinker about random stuff that might make life better or more meaningful

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